“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
More for the way it’s used through the book as a call-back/leit-motif sort of thing.
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I’m personally very fond of:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
and
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
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Horrorshow.
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My Uncle Louie’s:
So there’s this guy named Greg, Greg Samosa, an’ this one time he wakes up an’ he’s turned into this GIANT FUCKIN’ COCKROACH. Unbelievable, eh?
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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away. “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice-- they won’t hear you otherwise-- 'I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.
No, this isn’t the self indulgent introduction, with the rest of the novel proper written in some other mood; some other style, some other voice. The novel’s weird that way
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True! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
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The four-foot hermaphroditic organism from a distant solar system twitched in my arms as I
soul-kissed it.
From Mark Leyner’s “Et Tu, Babe”
The laboratory director would have killed me if he’d known that I’d snuck into the Galactic Lifeform Chamber with a bottle of wine, and an eclectic selection of tapes (Felix Mendelssohn, Steppenwolf, Barbara Mandrell) for a clandestine tryst with the cylindrical being whom the lab technicians had christened “Kitty Lafontaine.” I pipetted a few drops of 1982 Napa Valley Zinfandel into its alimentary aperture. Its synesthetic sensory apparatus was distributed evenly across the entirety of its shiny outer sheath so it could see, hear, smell, precognize, etc., from any point on its body. To say that holding Kitty Lafontaine in my arms was like nestling a large holiday beef log from Hickory Farms would certainly not convey the spine-tingling xenophilic libidinous awe I felt, but it would accurately convey the shape, mass, and weight of this fascinating creature who would irrevocably change all our lives that summer.
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Jane Austin?
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Nah. Virginia Wolff.
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I was looking for that one
For the second day in a row, I’m going to quote Chandler on this board:
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
The Big Sleep
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Came here to like the Flann O’Brien(*), Calvino, and Chandler, but I think it needs to be agreed that that Charles Dickens was a hell of a writer.
(*) Though his best work is the column he wrote for the Irish Times
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While I dearly love Dickens (Pickwick might be the most fun), I am surprised that no one went with, “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.” Therefore, I have rectified the situation.
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Thought about it, but went with Poe instead.
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I had to look this up. The opening lines of the Kirkus review of the book are fairly memorable in their own right:
Leyner’s follow-up to My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), which achieved a kind of cult status, is both less and more: Once again it’s a pop-culture collage with Leyner at center stage doing a series of stand-up routines, but it’s also like a pimple that Leyner decided to show off simply because it appeared on his face.
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Oh I remembered:
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.
also
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.
bonus
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens boy named baby tuckoo. . . .
No one would of believed at the begining of the comment thread
That war of the worlds wasn’t mentioned.
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